In the blog house
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As has previously been discussed, coming up with blog topics can at times be somewhat difficult. Sometimes inspiration will jump up and grab you, while other times it remains stubbornly out of reach. It's very rare, therefore, that the blog itself should serve as inspiration, but that's more or less how it happened this week. Permit me to explain...
I host my own website. More accurately, I pay a web hosting company for an allocation of space on the web and some DNS servers to point my domain name at, and then I use that space to hold my website. The very words you're reading are all hosted on that web space, within a MySQL database and displayed using a piece of blogging software called WordPress. I've done this for years. Okay, the site hasn't always had a blog on it. Prior to November 2007, it would have hosted something else: probably a holding page or whatever other drivel I could think to come up with at the time. But I've had my own site for years.
Towards the end of last week, however, that changed. For several days, the site disappeared. When visiting the site, my visitors and I were presented with the same DNS error page. Initially, I put it down to a temporary glitch that I had hoped my hosting company would resolve quickly. But as the hours turned into days and the days threatened to turn into weeks, I began to realise something was more seriously amiss.
As it turned out, the company I paid for the hosting space had some kind of dispute with the bigger hosting company they in turn held that space with. As a result, the bigger hosting company turned off the server. It wasn't just me that was affected. I had friends that used the same provider who were hit too, and a little research on Google soon turned up others.
It looked to all intents and purposes that this dispute wasn't going to be resolved, so I've taken the opportunity to find a new hosting supplier and moved my site to them. Luckily, I had a fairly recent backup and only needed to repost the latest few blogs (all of which I save locally anyway). So, with my new hosting space in operation, and my DNS settings updated, the site is now happily back up and running.
To you, dear reader, I apologise for any outage, or for any sudden swarm of RSS updates containing old posts when I restored the site onto the new server. I appreciate that since this is a personal website with very little that would be of interest, you are in a minority, and probably didn’t even notice there was an outage, but that you take the time to browse these pages at all warrants some mention.
The upside of this downtime is that I've managed to cheat my way through another blog topic. That said, restoring it was a bit of a pain, and while I'm due another post in a couple of weeks, I'd rather something (or someone) else provided the inspiration.